Suzuki, an elder statesman of the evergreen set, was recently quoted in the Paris-based publication L’Express as saying “Canada is full,” arguing, it seems, that to continue to bring in hundreds of thousands of immigrants each year is “crazy.”

“Although it’s the second largest country in the world, our useful area has been reduced,” he said.

That lit the immigration minister up like a firecracker. Resorting to Twitter, Kenney lambasted Suzuki’s remarks as “xenophobic” — the word refers having a morbid dislike of foreigners — and “anti-immigration.” His opinions, according to the Tory minister, are “toxic and irresponsible.”

Now, I’m no fan of Suzuki’s apocalyptic environmentalism. He may be sincere in his ecological concerns, but, like Al Gore, he also makes a lucrative living as a prophet of planetary disaster. In any case, it’s Kenney who’s being toxic.

For decades Canadians have been instructed about the ostensible benefits of mass immigration. They’ve been told huge numbers of immigrants are needed to keep the economy ticking and provide the tax base to pay for all those social programs we enjoy. In recent years, however, this justification for current immigration policies has been questioned by respectable scholars.

“The flow of immigration into Canada from around the world, and in particular the flow from Muslim countries, means a pouring in of numbers into a liberal society of people from cultures at best non-liberal,” Salim Mansur, a political scientist at the University of Western Ontario, said in testimony last year before a Senate committee. “But we know through our studies and observations that the illiberal mix of cultures poses one of the greatest dilemmas and an unprecedented challenge to liberal societies, such as ours, when there is no demand placed on immigrants any longer to assimilate into the founding liberal values of the country to which they have immigrated to and, instead, by a misguided and thoroughly wrong-headed policy of multiculturalism encourages the opposite.”

Gilles Paquet, an economist and professor emeritus at the University of Ottawa, likewise challenges the intellectual assumptions on which immigration policy is based — you know, multiculturalism, diversity and tolerance — arguing that they actually weaken Canadians’ sense of national solidarity.

“Being solicitous of diversity risks generating silo-societies, tolerance emphasizes the negative leave-them-alone kind of virtue, and multiculturalism further works at maintaining and enhancing cultural differences,” he writes in his recently published book, Moderato Cantabile: Toward a Principled Governance of Canada’s Immigration Regime.

This isn’t the kind of thing Kenney and crew want Canadians to hear. They want us to accept the Potemkin-village notion of Canada, the comforting fable of Canadians as endlessly tolerant and only too happy to diversify to the point of cultural meaninglessness. (As novelist Yann Martel once said, Canada “is the greatest hotel on Earth.”)

With his irrational denunciation of Suzuki, Kenney demonstrates that those who benefit most from current immigration levels — surely you don’t think the Conservatives would bring in so many immigrants if they weren’t a source of potential votes, or that our productivity-challenged corporate leaders would be happy to reduce a supply of unskilled labour that keeps wages lower than they could be — are quite willing to throw out ad hominem epithets of “racist,” “bigotry” and, in Suzuki’s case, “xenophobic.” They do so to intimidate those reluctant to accept the fairy tale view of immigration. Unfortunately, what Kenney and those who adopt tactics for invective don’t seem to understand is that they are fostering the very conditions of xenophobia and anti-immigrant attitudes that they claim to oppose.

Certainly, I expect Suzuki is sufficiently tough-minded to withstand criticism, and I doubt he’d share my skepticism regarding multiculturalism. (He is, so far as I know, a staunch supporter.) But there’s a requirement for reasoned argument at stake here (heated fine, sarcastic OK, but reasoned always). Suzuki, like any other citizen, is free to express his views, and he should be able to do so without some government minister using the weight of his office, political and moral, to rant against him.

Robert Sibley is a senior writer with the Citizen, attached to the editorial board. His new book, The Way of the 88 Temples, will be published in September.

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